Thursday, April 12, 2018

"When a Russian President Ended Up Drunk and Disrobed Outside the White House"

From History.com:

Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin had a weird relationship. There was the time the Russian president gave the U.S. president a pair of hockey jerseys that said “Yeltsin 96” and “Clinton 96.” There was also the time Clinton doubled over laughing when Yeltsin called the U.S. press “a disaster” at a press conference.

But perhaps the weirdest incident in
their professional relationship was when Yeltsin got drunk and wandered
into the street in his underwear, trying to get a pizza.

The incident happened during Yeltsin
and Clinton’s first meeting in Washington in September 1994. Although
there were glancing media reports about it over the years, it wasn’t
widely reported on until 2009, when author Taylor Branch published his
book The Clinton Tapes, based on his interviews with the president.

“Secret Service agents discovered Yeltsin alone on Pennsylvania Avenue, dead drunk, clad in his underwear, yelling for a taxi,” Branch wrote
in his book. “Yeltsin slurred his words in a loud argument with the
baffled agents. He did not want to go back into Blair House, where he
was staying. He wanted a taxi to go out for pizza.”

When Branch asked Clinton how the
situation ended, the president shrugged and said, “Well, he got his
pizza.” But the next night, Clinton recalled, Yeltsin tried to do it
again.

“Eluding security, he made his way
down the back stairs into the Blair House basement, where a building
guard mistook him for a drunken intruder,” Branch wrote. “Yeltsin was
briefly endangered until converging Russian and American agents sorted
out everyone’s affiliation.” Because the guards mistook him for an
intruder, “Clinton thought this incident, although contained within
Blair House, exposed even greater risk than the pizza quest.”...MORE

U.S. President Bill Clinton breaking into laughter after Russian
President Boris Yeltsin made a comment

about journalists at a news
conference in Hyde Park, New York on October 23, 1995.